Hello again and welcome back to Happy Hour. Today we have in our studio, Brad again. Hi, Brad.

Hello.

Some of you might recognize Brad from some of our earlier episodes on various topics, but Brad is very interested in a tech side of things in technology and in the geeky stuff so to speak, right?

Right.

So I thought I invite brad to talk to us about some very different topics. By the way, what are we gonna talk about today, Brad?

(Shall we talk about aliens?)

Wow... What's that? Are we gonna talk about aliens today?

Yep.

Great. That really freaked me out by the way. Aliens. But first of all, about the word itself alien can mean different things. Right?

Right. I'm technically an alien. I'm an alien from another country. So we talk about aliens being from people from other countries. But we also talk about aliens as being from outer space, from other planets and distant galaxies.

So aliens can be foreigners or out of space. Hopefully you are the first type of alien, not the second type. I'm not sure.

I might be the second, I'm not sure. So Lulu, what do you think when you of an alien?

What do I think of, you mean like how they look like?

Yeah.

I would say a typical, I have two images that directly jump into my head when you're talking about aliens. The first is the movie that really freaked me out. Think it's called Alien. You know, with the teeth with the breaking out of someone's stomach that really creepy. The other one is Men in Black. All these insects, they look like bugs, but they're equally kinda creepy and gross. I don't know, what is your idea of aliens?

Like in the US we really have two main kind of concepts of aliens. We have kind of like the Star Trek concept where most people are most aliens are human like, humanoid.

Humanoid. They're like humans.

Two arms, two legs, they should have ears and eyes. That's like mean the main idea in Star Trek at least.

Star Trek.

But then we have the aliens like you mentioned the bug like aliens from the movie Alien and that genre of film.

But what are some of the most referenced or the most popular TV or movie aliens? You mentioned Star Trek, is that one to the big group that people generally recognize?

Definitely, when it comes to Star Trek, there's two major alien species that people think of. One is the Vulcan which you often see referenced in like the Big Bang theory, Live Long and Prosper, Spark.

Is it the one that they have this really weird hand gesture?

Yes.

Ah Live Long and Prosper.

And then the second one would be the Klingons. They're very war like and they have really broad kind of like, what's a good way to put it, their foreheads are very armored. It's a natural kind of armor they have and they use it when they're fighting. And most of their weapons you can see are kind of like hand held weapons like swords and those type of things. That's what people kind of see when they think of a Klingon.

To be honest, every time you see any movie or TV show where you have sort of like geeks or nerds, and then they bound to mention Klingon, always. But what about some of the earliest alien concept? Was it in si-fi film?

Yeah, there's a lot of early si-fi that talks about aliens, such as War of the Worlds. There's been a few different, we've seen this movie few different iterations. We had one in the fifties and one more recently with Tom Cruise. But even before that, like the concept of aliens has been around for millennia.

Really?

You can see stories of aliens in a lot of old, in a lot of stories. They often referred to them as like gods from the space or like the men in chariots are in the stars. And some people think of them as being maybe not gods, but they were actual aliens.

So you're saying that some of the earlier stories about gods were actually depictions of aliens?

Yeah.

That's interesting.

A lot of people in like literature kind of look at the stories and how they depict them, and it doesn't really sound like they're necessarily depicting them as a god would be depicted, but more as like maybe a life form that came from the heavens as in not heaven the heaven but the sky.

I see, and why do you think is the alien theme so popular? What really fascinates people?

I think what it comes down to is the fact that we have been for the most part limited to the earth. It's only in the last, like the last century that we've been able to start exploring outside of our planet. I think the fact that we can actually leave the planet now kind of makes people wonder, what will we find when we go a further.

What's out there. But we were talking about mostly movie depictions of aliens movies. Do you think they are anything like possibly real aliens? Will aliens look like that?

I don't think aliens will look anything like what we see them in the movie. I think the only possible really are the only possible alien depiction that we kind of see in the movie is maybe more like the one from aliens where they're more bug like because if you look at the earth, the earth has lots of insects. They're very simple life forms in comparison. So I think maybe there's probably a lot of life forms more similar to that, but they're probably not even anything like we would imagine. Life evolved here in one way. It's probably much different elsewhere. They may not even have DNA like we have. It might be an entirely different type of structure. Creatures on earth are what's called carbon based.

So carbon based. Actually, I think all life forms on earth all known life forms on earth are carbon based.

Right.

And they might not be aliens?

They may not be on other planets. Right? They might be maybe silicon based or they may be other types of materials. There's the idea what the movie Transformers, for example, those are aliens that are robots. And so there may be aliens out there that are made of metal. That might be the farthest depiction of an alien that we've had.

Metal aliens, that would really completely change our perception of what is a living creature, what is a living organism. Now comes the question like are there any evidence, are there people or government organizations actually doing serious research on aliens? Not just you know people writing stories or movie scripts, but are there any serious research projects?

There are some different research projects. There are scientists, some of them chemists or biologists that are looking at the possibility of how life might have evolved differently on another planet. So they are seeing if there's any possibility that there are other types of life forms. But then aside from scientists, there's a lot of kind of what we might look as a backyard scientist. There are lots of people who say they've been abducted and this type of thing.

Maybe we can talk about that in the more advanced episodes. So if we want to actually look for aliens, where do we start? Or have we already started looking for aliens?

We have SETI, which is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence?

What is that, like a national governmental or is it the private project?

I'm not sure if it's private. I think it's heavily government funded, but it's not controlled by the government from what I know, but basically it's an array of satellite dishes that collect signals from outer space and analyzes them. A lot of times, the signals that they get are coming from stars. And usually like what they find is just the stars will send out a radio signal. Everything kind of gives off a radio signal. But what they're looking for is one that has like specific types of repetitions.

I see. What did you say, SETI, its search for extraterrestrial...

Intelligence.

It's basically ET. ET is extraterrestrial.

Right.

Okay. Don't know if they have made any headways in that.

There's been a few theories as to how we might find aliens aside from using satellite dishes looking for signals. There are possibilities for being lots of planets out there that house extraterrestrial life. They may not be sending signals, so to say. But the one thing that we might be able to look for is something referred to as a Dyson sphere or a cluster.

What is that theory?

So basically is once a civilization has become advanced enough, they can start harvesting all the power of their sun. And they would do this by basically enclosing the sun in an array or a sphere of basically solar panels to collect the energy from the sun. And when they're doing this, the sun would be covered up for periods of time, which would give us the indication that the sun was blinking. By looking for that, we might find an alien species that is building a Dyson sphere or using Dyson clusters.

Look for a blinking sun.

Basically, a blinking sun.

And also one question that I've always thought about is that in recent years, there's some frontier scientists obviously talking about the possibility of humans migrating or moving to Mars. So what about any possible life forms on Mars?

There's a possibility that there's microbial life on Mars. There was an old theory that there might be Martians living under the surface. There is actually a theory that humans originally came from Mars, and maybe like the planet itself became uninhabitable. And that's why we left and came to earth.

Rright. I think we covered the basics. And I have to say, I'm even more confused. And hopefully we're gonna talk about more of these in the advanced episode and explore some of the so-called real stories of alien encounters.

(Sounds good)

Thank you, alien Brad. And thank you for tuning in for the show. Brad and I were gonna continue with this topic in the advanced episode. But meanwhile, if you have anything to add, if you have any questions or any experience to share, leave us a comment in the comment section. Thank you, Brad.

Yeah. Thank you. And definitely if you've been abducted by an alien, let us know.

Definitely. We'll see you next time. Bye.

See you. Bye.

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